Washing Water is an experimental project (In the sense of deeply rigorous and wily experiment design) that questions Houston’s associations to water post-Harvey and in the face of climate change. For the Idea Fund I aim to develop eleven tub-scale bath experiences from my current participatory research project in which people make a waterscape at a hand-bath scale. These waterscape events are the survey mechanism for building out the full scale baths, which will require more infrastructure. Scaling up these experiments to the bathtub scale means a room sized installation that includes modulating lights, temperature, and sound.

Its about a full somatic experience. Somatic means sensed from the inside, our real felt sense of ourselves and our physical bodies in the world. The projects aim to represent each City Council District and serve as a survey of the city’s relationship to water, not through census data but through sensory imagination.

What I’m really driven by is this citywide cringe we had/have every time it rains after Harvey. How to unclench that.

I don’t think when we are stuck between a trauma and a foreclosed future we have very much room to move. I know there are many many many conferences on flood policy and disaster relief but these are in the format of people sitting in chairs listening.

I believe what Bessle van Der Kolk wrote in The Body Keeps the Score- that we need to feel ourselves moving and active to move on and be uncarcerated from traumatic feedback loops.

I also believe what Octavia Butler describes so well, that there are loopholes to stuckness found in time travel and scale switching.

So I’m kind of like let’s talk about hurricanes but from a bathtub.

Of course global climate change and a citywide disaster punches buttons in the individual and social traumas we also carry.

I have a whole life of experience of making things to make a way out of no way.

And

I’m just really into learning about how creative interventions in our associations to abstract symbols can remap our world maps and internal maps.

And again I’m devoted to this occurring not only from the neck up, or in a clinical or academic setting only, but with our full physical and animal selves recruited as well.

This project is made possible with the support from The Idea Fund. The Idea Fund is a re-granting program administered by DiverseWorks, Aurora Picture Show, and Project Row Houses and funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts